While Walton was tasked with responding to a very dangerous situation, Reynolds was tasked with supporting first responders like Walton and all the others who showed up immediately at the mass shooting at Hesston’s Excel Industries, where four people, including the shooter, were killed Thursday and 14 others injured.
Finally, Monday was an opportunity for the two men to sit side-by-side and speak briefly of what they experienced.
For Walton, the tragedy began unfolding as he learned of a shooting victim near 12th and Meridian in Newton. As he was dealing with that incident, another 911 call came through.
“Everyone is coming to me and I hear of more shootings on the radio. I am trying to figure this out,” Walton said.
He then heard over the radio of a barrage of bullets at Excel and a deputy being fired upon in his car. Someone was shooting from a door. Finally, the shooter, Cedric Ford, was inside the building.
“He was just spraying,” Walton said. “The deputy and police chief go in taking fire and, thank God, shoot and kill the shooter.”
The wounded were being brought out of the building and even one assistant police chief took a victim in his pickup truck to the hospital. While it was confusing, said Walton, it was not chaotic. They had been training for the inevitable for the past two years.
“We had a system in place and an idea of what was to happen,” Walton said.
Preparing for the worst
Reynolds had just left the sheriff’s office Thursday afternoon, stopping to see his wife, who was volunteering at a blood drive at church. His 24-year-old son, who works at Excel, also was at the blood drive, which was a relief when Reynolds heard over the radio about the shootings at the plant.
Because he knew his son was safe, he was able to focus 100 percent on the situation. He received a call from the sheriff to come to the basement of the Hesston City Hall, where a command post had been established.
“For the first 12 hours I worked incident command, logistics and keeping track of the chaplains,” said Reynolds, who looks like any other Harvey County deputy dressed in a navy-blue polo shirt with the department’s logo on the front. Only the silver cross around his neck reveals his spiritual duties.
“Everything is fuzzy,” he added as he reflected back upon the past four days. It took hours to locate family members.
“We had to be detectives,” Reynolds said. At about 12:30 a.m. Friday, he had coordinated three chaplains with the Kansas Bureau of Investigation to carry the heartbreaking news to the victims’ families.
Catalysts for healing
For Reynolds, ordained as a pastor with the Foursquare Church, his duties as chaplain have included meeting the spiritual needs of the grieving families and the first responders.
Once at the hospital, a different set of chaplains took over. While Reynolds worked with responders, Prairie View Mental Health Center provided sites for walk-in grief counseling for all involved in the incident.
“Excel has an employee assistance group that has done a phenomenal job with counseling,” Reynolds said.
Reynolds has been trained in critical-incident stress management, a process to help people in crisis trauma to open up.
“The more we tell our stories, the faster the emotional healing comes,” Reynolds said.
Serving the community
Walton, 66, came to Kansas to attend Kansas Wesleyan University after graduating from high school on Long Island, New York. He has served as Harvey County Sheriff for the past eight years. Prior to that, he spent 20 years with the Newton Police Department. He recently announced his retirement, planned for January 2017.
While Thursday’s tragedy was his first mass shooting, Walton said the 2005 killing of Harvey County Deputy Sheriff Kurt Ford ranks at the top of his worst experiences in law enforcement. Ford was his close friend.
“I saw him get shot,” Walton said. “His blood was on me.”
During Thursday’s crisis, Walton called in the FBI because of the possibility, at first, that the shooting might be a terrorist attack. They soon discovered it involved a lone gunman who had been issued a protection-from-abuse order earlier in the day and then went on a rampage.
Several hundred people were in the building at the time. Hesston Police Chief Doug Schroeder, who is credited with killing shooter Cedric Ford, remains on leave from the department. He was not available for comment.
While Walton and his department had been planning for the possibility of an active-shooter incident, it was just in the middle of February that local city and government personnel, along with school administrators and emergency response workers, gathered in Newton to plan for an active shooter in Harvey County.
Craig Dunlavy, Newton deputy police chief, said it was ironic that the conversation with schools, colleges and hospitals had just begun.
“They were just getting the conversation going,” Dunlavy said.
The plan was to have more meetings. Instead they had the real event.
Dunlavy, who has been in law enforcement for 23 years, was one of the many officers first on the scene Thursday.
“It was all hands on deck,” Dunlavy said. “You are trained to go in and you accept that responsibility to go in. But you still have to go through the door. It’s hard to do.”
He was impressed with how more than 10 law enforcement from around Harvey County responded to the call and arrived so quickly.
“As a department our hearts go out to all the victims and to the community.” Dunlavy said. “We’re all in this together.”
Now it’s time to begin debriefing.
“After any major event we get together and discuss what went right and what went wrong,” Dunlavy said. “There were far more things that went right as a community of first responders. And it all started with the chief of police in Hesston. He did a fabulous job.”
The past four days have all blended together for those who responded on the scene, from the emergency crews to the investigators with the FBI and KBI as well as the ATF. Through Sunday night, the local chaplain’s corps, which included non-chaplain personnel, made certain that 180 first responders and investigators were hydrated and fed. Food came from area communities and restaurants around central Kansas.
“It blew the first responders away that they were cared for at that level,” said Reynolds. “It’s not something they were used to. I told them, ‘Welcome to Harvey County.’ “
The work now is to process what was experienced.
“We are in the recovery stage,” said Dunlavy.
According to Walton, “The plant has been turned over to Excel. There is a lot of blood, and crews are cleaning.”
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©2016 The Hutchinson News (Hutchinson, Kan.)
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